Der Automat pondered:

So your argument is that a sound whatever instrument or device would has created it is always analog. Never mind if it was produced by a printed circuit, an analog oscillator or another source, when it gets the speaker it automatically becomes analogue. That way we can't differentiate between digital sound and analog sound. Then, I wonder why we draw a distinction between one and another.

That's exactly what I mean. I think we're debating two distinctly different things here: one is the way the sound was originally created, e.g. by an instrument or via some sort of computerized tool, and the other is the way sound is reproduced when playing records (or whatever medium). Let's begin with the first one, how sounds are created. No matter what the source of the sound is, be it a trombone, a piano, or a computer generating purely synthetic sounds (say, via amplitude modulation - my favourite :), we need to agree on the fact that once the sound is played, the result is sound waves emanating from the speakers / headphones / whatever. This is undisputable since that is the physical definition of sound: moving air. Alright, so the question whether the sound was produced by means of a real acoustic instrument, a computer fiddling with AM sounds, or someone yelling into a microphone becomes kind of obsolete, since what you actually hear when playing/singing/yelling are sound waves. As we also know, a waveform is what makes up an analogue signal, and thus they are one and the same. This is what I mean by saying that "all sound is analogue by default". Ok, now we need to record these sounds so that other people can listen to it without having to visit you in person and hear you playing whatever it was you were playing to produce those sounds. This is where things start to happen, and this is what the discussion is about (at least that's what I'm talking about :) You now have sounds coming out from your speakers - origin of the sound is irrelevant as stated above. Now, do we want to record this digitally or do we want to capture it on an analogue medium? Digital recording is, and always will be, an approximation of the source material. I've described this before, and it's due to the fact that a digital recording has to approximate the original signal by using samples. However high the sample rate is, the end result will always be an approximation of the original signal (since there is no known way to reproduce a random waveform by using samples of it, unless the number of samples are infinite, which is of course not possible). Granted, the approximation can be extremely good, to the point where nobody would ever notice the difference. In theory, at least. Analogue recording, on the other hand, does not rely on making samples of the original waveform. Instead, it attempts to capture a copy of the waveform itself, onto whatever the medium may be. This isn't a perfect method either, of course, since any attempts to make an analogue copy of a signal will fail to some extent due to imperfections in the recording medium, playback limitations due to the equipment used and so forth. However, in theory it is possible to make a perfect replica of the signal, given a perfect medium to store it in, and perfect conditions when making the copy. In the real world this never happens of course, but in general, if you really want to, you can make a very, very good recording that would rival any digital "sample" of the same signal. I think the best example I can give on analogue v/s digital recording of something is to compare analogue and digital photography. I think it's safe to say that anybody will see that an analogue photograph is vastly superior to a digital photo, no matter how sophisticated the digital photo is. A "real" photo will always look more "real", be "warmer" and "less synthetic" .. Heard those terms before? Yep, it's the same "vague" opinions people express when hearing vinyl records played back the way they're supposed to. Or why not look at movies. How come an SVHS recording of a DVD will outperform a DivX encoding of the same movie? How could an analogue recording of a digital source be better than a digital copy of a digital source? Simple, when encoding the DVD as DivX, you're compressing it again.. Approximating an already approximated signal. Kind of the same digital slaughter as ripping CDs to MP3... (and don't get me started on mp3! ;) Note though that I'm not engaging in a discussion about longevity of a medium (well, vinyl is the best archival material found so far ;) or the ease of use of the same (CD wins easily here), but just the actual differences in sound. That's the only thing that interests me (but granted, many people are of the opinion that ease of use is the most important factor). Now, what I'm saying is that a good-quality analogue recording will always beat a digital one, and this is also what I'm finding in vinyl records. Unless they've been produced by people who don't know what they're doing, they're always vastly superior to a CD release of the same material. Not that most people care, but I do, and that's all that matters to me :) I'm just trying to share my findings, and hope that other will discover the same delights as I have, by "going back" to vinyl. I hope I'm making some sense here. English isn't my first language so some things aren't as easy to describe as I would want them to be. Cheers, Peo

Well put. amir Per-Olof Karlsson wrote:

I hope I'm making some sense here. English isn't my first language so some things aren't as easy to describe as I would want them to be.